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Monthly Archives: January 2014

The new year has gotten off to a snow start, though.

For us here at SophSoft, Incorporated and Digital Gamecraft, 2014 is starting a little bit later than originally scheduled. We took our usual couple of weeks off at the turn of the year, but the weather decided to insert itself into our plans. On the first full day of our break, we were hit by a serious ice storm, and although we were very lucky to be mostly unaffected by the power outages, our immediate neighbors were without electricity until New Years Eve. Fortunately, they were back online just in time to watch the Michigan State University Spartanswin the Rose Bowl!

On the first day “back” from the break, we received more than 18 inches of snow, which essentially shut down all of East Lansing and surrounding communities for a couple of days. Although we could still get development work done, the first priority was digging out, and that took many hours of physical effort, so it was not easy to just jump right back onto the project schedule. On top of that, we received several pieces of personal news, both bad and good, so it was an emotional week, too. (Personally, I managed to get sick in the midst of all of this, from which illness I am still recovering.)

Nevertheless, despite the slow ramp up, we are now approaching full speed ahead with game development in 2014. We added some newer development systems to assist with our desktop and mobile development, so now we have a state-of-the-art environment for creating games for Windows (up to 8.1), Mac OS X (through Mavericks), Linux (Ubuntu), iOS, Android, Windows Phone, HTML 5, Silverlight, Flash, Xbox 360, OUYA, and more. If anybody needs to contract some programming talent, you can contact me here.

The 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi (Russia) are just three weeks away, and we expect to have unprecedented coverage, both through our @DGOlympics twitter feed, where we will again provide results for all events (as we did for the London Summer Olympics in 2012), as well as through a new (broader) game site that we plan to announce shortly. If you have any interest in the Olympic Games, please follow us at @DGOlympics and spread the word.

On the Solitaire front, our top priority is finishing the substantial rebuild of Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition and the other Goodsol Solitaire Engine games. While we have, unquestionably, the best technical platform (and the most games) for the Mac, we are revisiting the interface to make it even more fun to play. Of course, we are also planning to add many more new games in our relentless march toward 1000. 🙂

We have a new iOS upgrade for Demolish! Pairs (and later, Demolish! Pairs FTP) in the works. We are adding (at least) one new play mode, by popular request, and several other new features. (The exact list of features will be determined based on scheduling considerations.) Of course, you can buy Demolish! Pairs on the App Store now and get the upgrade for free when it is released.

There are currently three more major projects in design and development, but I will announce each of those here at an appropriate (later 🙂 ) time. Additionally, there are always a number of maintenance projects which, at this point, include changes to our iOS games mandated by Apple to be “optimized for iOS 7”, modifications to most of our Windows games to properly handle touch interface changes made in Windows 8.1, and of course, everything can use a fresh coat of virtual paint for 2014.

Rather than spend any more time typing about this, I should get back to actual development work, as 2014 is looking to be our most exciting year yet!